Ask HN: Would you guys visit a purely hacker-oriented version of HN? - <AUTHOR>

A friend and I are sitting on tailrecursion.com wondering what to do with it. I suggested it would be a cool name for an HN-like site that catered specifically to those who spend 8 hours a day behind an emacs or vi session (and no less!), rather than the marketing/sales/non-hacker-founder types (which HN perfectly addresses). What do you guys think? <comment><USER3> If I could subscribe to other HN members' posts and upmodded links, I could, in theory be able to preemptively sort the posts that I liked in common with those users. All it would take is a new menu item at the top of the page- called 'peers'. When a HN user posts a link I find most appropriate to my lifestyle, I have the option to subscribe to future links posted by that HN user; all of the links ( or even comments ) of the peers I subscribe to would be listed in chronological order on the 'peers' page.

If a similar functionality was enabled and the link posting member was able to tag the submitted link, I think it would make it more efficient for the subscribing member to get the appropriate content listed first- that is, if the subscriber could choose to subscribe to the links that were relevantly tagged by each peer.

Simply put: if you ( yes you ) submitted a link that was tagged 'emacs', and I had subscribed to your links tagged as such, I would see it listed on my peers page ( likely near the top, even if I missed a few days ). If you submitted a link tagged 'founder inspiration' and I did not subscribe to that tag of yours, I would only see that link on the front page ( if it made it; and I saw it in time ).

Sorta like a collective intelligent RSS feed, hosted on HN!

<comment><USER4> The problem with this is that it fragments the community, you now no longer read "Hack News" but instead read "Stuntgoat News" which has a readership of 1. It may have some crossover with "Almost News" but I think it would be deferent enough to remove the feeling of community that a site like this engenders which I think is one of the reasons people take the time to write long interesting comments (like yours here).

<comment><USER3> I was thinking of simply adding a link at the top of the main page between 'new' and 'threads' that was 'peers' and I could subscribe to multiple HN users' tagged links. I believe it would allow a closer connection between the members of the community that have interests in common. Seemingly, there is a sub-culture of people interested in mostly programming news; so, instead of moving them to a new site altogether, allow them to maintain a connection to this site, at the same time as giving them a tool to build community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would enjoy an HN-like site with a greater focus on algorithms and other more complex material.

HN sometimes gets these posts on things like closures, functional programming, monads, y combinators, etc. A lot of these are just posts from Wikipedia or such, but they're interesting and generate a lot of discussion.

Similarly, I enjoy the more physics and chemistry oriented tech articles.

To summarize: I'd love an HN for theoretical CS, physics, chemistry, etc, more focused on the actual sciences than on marketing, sales, deployment, etc. I'd be there in an instant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly! The closest I have found to this is reddit.com/r/compsci, but the comments are nowhere near as valuable as when those threads make it to HN

<comment><USER6> LtU

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You know, I actually feel the contrary: Hacker News has gone the way of more hacker than startups. _shrug_

<comment><AUTHOR> It makes perfect sense, hacker news should be more for startup/business news than really _hacker_ news.

<comment><USER8> HN started out as (hacker) startup news, and it HAS been moving from that focus (part of it intentional, such as the name change to Hacker News). Your sarcasm falls a bit flat :p

<comment><USER9> Actually, no, said sarcasm does not fall flat. A good friend of mine described the articles displayed here as a "rat's nest" which does not lead anywhere. At first, I thought he was crazy; then I began critically looking at said articles.

I signed up here looking for what the original post posits providing; what I found were articles about startups, business, marketing, the current/next great gold rush, followed by the token (recently it has been improving) programmer/hacker article. And the articles about startups, business, and marketing were not great on any scale; in fact upon critical review, said articles advocated rather bad strategies. Strategies which amounted to little more than legalized scams, strategies which optimize for the short term, strategies promoting win at any cost, strategies which advocate me first and to hell with the consequences; in short, strategies of which Phineas Taylor Barnum would have been proud.

Before joining the Hacker News community, I was interested in starting my own business. Now that I see what is advocated as "startup culture", I want nothing to do with starting a business in the United States (because my conclusion is the culture and laws of the U.S. have optimized for short term gain, with the resulting push towards the strategies mentioned earlier). What happened to a business (either startup or established business) having integrity in all of their relationships, being a responsible citizen of the business ecosystem it operates within, and providing a legacy beyond the generation within which it was founded?

In conclusion, I would be VERY interested in being involved with the community type proposed by jcapote (in any capacity: contributing member, developer, beta tester, et cetera).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Which articles currently on the frontpage of HN would you not include?

<comment><AUTHOR> \--I would exclude these:

Why Amazon Vine is a Threat Worth Talking About (jonbischke.com)

Facebook | Username (facebook.com)

MySpace Is In Far Worse Shape Than Its New Executives Thought

Does It Matter If The Future Isn't Available In Canada? (techvibes.com)

Authors, poets replace reporters at an Israeli newspaper for one day

All Hell May Break Loose On Twitter In 2 Hours (techcrunch.com)

Heyzap (YC09/USV) looking for a flash contractor.

Humans prefer cockiness to expertise (newscientist.com)

Should you move your startup to the Valley? (tonywright.com)

Atul Gawande: University of Chicago Medical School Commencement Address (newyorker.com)

All my games are now free (toucharcade.com)

How to find new startup ideas? The answer is in the question. (dashnine.org)

More Ways to Sell Out of Your Startup Stock (wsj.com)

A post college memorandum (alexjmann.com)

The TV industry is where the newspaper industry was five years ago: In denial. (businessinsider.com)

The Economics of the HDMI Cable Ripoff (marginalrevolution.com)

Use of LSD-25 for Computer Programming [scribd] (maps.org)

Tagged: The World's Most Annoying Website (time.com)

\--I would include these:

Zombie Operating Systems and ASP.NET MVC

The hairy ball theorem

Celery: A Distributed Task Queue for Django

Linus Torvalds on some good git development practices

Offline Processing on Google App Engine [scribd]

Why "next-gen games" went gray, brown, and grey.

What is RubySpec?

Great talk on the Python GIL [video][slides in comments]

<comment><USER11> If those stories were excluded, I'd be very uninterested in visiting here. This sort of tunnel-vision is why hackers and engineer types often seem completely out of touch with society -- and not in the good way. It's engineer-itis.

<comment><USER12> I enjoy the engineering tunnel vision that good days on HN provide me. On the bad days, HN, for me, is sort of only the culture and pieces of society that those who don't know much about either are interested in. To learn about people, places, and things I don't know anything about that aren't hacking related - I go outside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ugh, this is such a web1.0 problem. Instead, why not write a greasemonkey plugin that cross-submits posts to Academic Hacker News when you upvote them, and only upvote academic articles?

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately it looks like Academic Hacker News ran out of steam (no new entries) :(

<http://www.cs.toronto.edu:40106/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yes, please!

I crave programming news, and I find none. Proggit is full of Techcrunch-esque crap these days, and meme threads dominate the discussions. HN is food for thought, but it caters to a broader audience these days. If you can build and maintain a community with the same standards as HN, do it.

Since I have too much free time on my hands, I'm even ready to lend a hand :p

</comment><comment><USER16> Good idea...but its been done already by Academic Hacker News: <http://www.cs.toronto.edu:40106/>

<comment><USER17> The problem is that not much is being posted over there and even less discussion.

Edit: I would be all for a more active site. And good discussions of technical issues a step above, "how do I fix this problem?"

<comment><USER18> Agreed, but I don't see how starting yet another site will fix the problematic lack of discussion.

<comment><USER19> Academic Hacker News may be suffering because the term academic in the name scares a lot of people away.

<comment><USER20> Maybe it's just solving the wrong problem. AHN only discusses CS, but I'm sure the discussion would not devolve if you included other subjects (ie Physics, Biology). A potential problem is that though you might have read something interesting, it might not quite fit.

Perhaps because the articles are dense and require time to read (a prof. told me to expect to take at least three hours to read an academic paper properly as an expert in the field), it would help a lot if the original poster would help jump start the discussion by talking about the interesting features of the experiment or study. I'm not sure if this can be forced though.

AHN (completely) aside, I had another idea for a news site that addresses a pain point of mine. I'm not sure if it belongs in this thread, but it seems as good a place as any. Many, if not most, articles in the mainstream media are horribly devoid of content, information, and context. An aggregator that posts stories and has a historian annotate them and add links to documents (especially primary source!) describing previous relevant events (sorted by importance and date) might be really cool and useful. I am stumped as to how to actually make it work though as if you do it with personnel, your labor costs would be enormous. On the other hand, there may be a ready supply of liberal arts doctorates who missed out on professorships (I understand there is a major discrepancy between the supply and demand). The real trick of this would be that if you managed to realistically rate historical events according to how they impacted the world, then you could sort your front page by both newness and importance score, thus mining the gems that are misplaced in regular papers. However, this would be susceptible to gaming by writers - which is unavoidable in the long run.

Automation would be much better. However, it becomes a classification problem along waaaay too many dimensions, and assembling a supervised learning dataset would be a giant task that I'm not even sure how to do as these labels can be very uncertain.

The rewards would be great if some sort of system like this could be devised on a reasonably sized scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No. I'll be first to say that I would not, in fact, visit it.

Or so I expect. I could of course be proven wrong.

</comment><comment><USER22> Good luck; starting a social news site is hard.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm also working on something similar at <http://swooshnews.org/>. I'll post more info later when I have something to show.

</comment><comment><USER24> I bet you could build one in about 5 minutes and see what people think. <http://slinkset.com/>

</comment><comment><USER25> No need.

Every time I have wanted a to know about a specific topic on HN, I have used search (searchyc.com) and found plenty of success. I think HN/similar would become rather stale if it was ONLY about programing/CS concepts. I think a variety of discussion topics keeps this forum healthy and well balanced.

</comment><comment><USER26> Great idea, but "tailrecursion.com" is biased towards functional programming. Not _all_ hackers are lisp/fp-hackers.

Of course, I understand that that's the domain you have, and your starting point is "what to do with it' - so you have to use it! And it's quite alright with me if your site is targeting lisp-hackers only. And it may be that the interests of lisp and non-lisp hackers substantially (or maybe totally) overlap. And, for example, the name "Y-combinator" doesn't seem to have done any harm.

PS: I do about 3-6 hours vi per day when typing, but most of my "coding" is done on paper or in the shower. _Do I count as a hacker? Can I join?_

<comment><USER27> What? I thought nearly all languages supported tail recursion.

<comment><USER28> Yes, but in language implementations without TCO, it's just recursion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think we need a multi-view HN in which we can filter out all non-hacking related news.

In that way, you cater both technical users as well as non-technical ones.

</comment><comment><USER4> Go for it, it might work. I think there's a little more to creating a good site then just building and letting stuff happen. There needs to be something that binds the community and some way of keeping the focus. Otherwise it will just drift to the lowest common denominator.

I for one will definitely give it a good try though.

Love the domain by the way, definitely sounds like a site I'd like :)

</comment><comment><USER30> Slightly off-topic. An alternate idea for tailrecursion.com: how about creating a service which would provide 'unlimited' tail keywords. - <USER2> 'unlimited' part is just for the pitch to go with recursion.

This is of great interest/need to marketers and does involve recursion in a way that you use a seed to generate few keywords and then in turn use them to generate more. People would pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think that description fits with the content you find on <http://programming.reddit.com>

</comment><comment><USER32> May I suggest <http://www.artima.com/>, although not just anyone can post news there?

</comment><comment><USER33> I feel this need for purely hacker oriented news too. That's why i started a little feed aggregator for blogs by Montreal hackers : <http://montrealhackers.com> .

That said, if you start a purely hacker-oriented version of HN i will watch it. :)

</comment><comment><USER34> Actually, I find HN to be the perfect mix of world news, economics, math papers and programming stuff, so no. And I don't fall into any of the "types" listed, I'm a CS-student (at least in one month I am), and don't have any serious plans of starting a company;)

</comment><comment><USER35> i would not. i have a lot of interest outside typing.

i prefer news site for 'creation' -- not showing often in hn: from bits (how to make buttons, logos, diet, health, pets, hobbies, etc) to physical (how to make soap, ink, fert, shoes, clothing, carpentry, masonry, housing, bomb, cooking, sport, etc)

also news for alternative living is interesting (like how to live in desert, mountain, sailing, around-world-air travel, live under $1usd/day, etc)

these stuffs are of course a google away (as is everything else), but rarely shown in hn maybe because chemistry (and physics?) is not the prerequisite for CS / EE

or maybe those are 'not hackers news' _shrug_

</comment><comment><USER36> You need to write an experimental dialect of a functional programming language first.

</comment><comment><USER37> "I suggested it would be a cool name for an HN-like site that catered specifically to those who spend 8 hours a day behind an emacs or vi session (and no less!)"

I like the idea, to be honest; even though I use TextMate. :D

</comment><comment><USER38> It seems to me that, with business, things are constantly changing, thus making it suitable for "news", whereas programming itself is a slow-moving craft. I mean, your text editors are from the 1970s.

<comment><USER15> Not really, no. Programmers deal with tools. Programming languages, IDEs, text editors are all tools. Hammers haven't changed much in the last 100 years, so why should our tools change radically? There are people who have been using Emacs for 10+ years. Making radical changes negatively affects programmer productivity.

Hackers embrace new programming paradigms whole heartedly. Learning new programming languages or grokking a new library/framework is fun. Suddenly replacing the tools that have become muscle-memory with something completely different is definitely _not_ fun.

IMO, revolution is favored when it comes to programming languages, frameworks and libraries. Evolution is favored when it comes to tools of the trade (text editors, commandline tools, etc.)

<comment><USER38> _Hackers embrace new programming paradigms whole heartedly_

I guess. But I've seen so many fawning articles on Lisp (birthdate: 1958) that I'm tempted to stand by my original point: It's a slow-moving craft.

EDIT: By the way, I was shocked to look at my own username's created date. 842 days. Jesus christ, time flies. Anyway, most of you probably don't realize that this forum was originally called "startup news" and was designed mainly for business, not "hacking" whatever that is.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombinator.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Absolutely. I'd even expect some cross-pollination as well.

</comment><comment><USER40> you mean employees of startups / non-founders? Or founders of startups for which marketing is irrelevant?

<comment><AUTHOR> Either. Just wanted to emphasize that the discussions are going to be deeply technical in nature and not business related in any sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Yes! Do it. I want to read gory articles from the hacking fronts.

Better yet: write some nice content?

</comment><comment><USER42> I couldn't handle yet another site to check regularly. I sub-hn might be more appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't actually know for sure, but isn't this what reddit programming is for?

<comment><AUTHOR> It _was_ for that, but it's caliber has definitely lightened over the years. Compare:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080123104208/http://reddit.com/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080123104208/http://reddit.com/r/programming)

<http://reddit.com/r/programming>

<comment><USER44> Gosh, I remember reading those stories on progreddit that day. I was beginning to wonder if I had just imagined the decline in quality or if instead my tastes had just changed considerably.

All the haskell, lisp, FP, compsci stories are gone, the comments are complete drivel. I rarely see a story that is worth reading (and I read reddit compulsively several times a day). I think a lot of the blame can be placed on including progreddit on the main page when the subreddits were introduced. Suddenly there were a lot of non-programmers on progreddit.

To the OP, yes I would like to see a hacker version of hackernews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Absolutely. Build it, and I will come. HN is awesome for its variety of startup/programming related news but I would love to see a site dedicated to nothing but programming, front-end(html/css/javascript), and science news. Would you even consider curating the content somewhat? Definitely have a voting system in place, but be compelled to remove content that doesn't match the purpose of the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> We plan to aggressively (but openly) moderate submissions. Another idea we were kicking around was instead of using forms to submit comments or stories, you would do it solely via the API.

<comment><USER46> Why not just use the reddit codebase?

<comment><USER47> Or the HN codebase if you plan to go down this route.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> OK, If it's really good I'll make it the secondary home page.

</comment><comment><USER49> It depends on the definition of "hack".

</comment><comment><USER50> Yes!</comment>


How Google sets goals: OKRs - <AUTHOR> https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72c7#.oiq7kvle6 <comment><USER2> My current company employs the OKR method. The following points related to my experience with them.

There are definitely some good points to them. OKRs manage to delegate company-wide tasks down to their appropriate departments and individuals/groups that will tackle them.

They also can be a pain. We set our OKRs every quarter, having to base our work for the next 3 months off from predictions–what we (our boss and board) want to accomplish, what [we] think will be important in the future–and are locked into working based on those predictions for a whole quarter.

They also don't account for your individual tasks, but your "company vision" goals. So if your job mainly deals with day-to-day tasks, and you are given OKRs from management, then you are now burdened with the work of 2 people.

The article also states > OKRs are not synonymous with employee evaluations.

The unfortunate thing is, OKRs make a great shortcut to grading employee performance. For example, in lieu of an annual bonus, our company sets a max- cap bonus amount and divides it by 4 (one for each quarter). If you hit 1.0 (100%) every quarter, you get all of your bonus. But then there is the threshold certain companies put on an OKR, where if you don't make a certain grade, you don't receive anything. So if you hit .75 you squeak by and get 75% of your 1/4 of the bonus. But if you hit .74 then you receive nothing. And if this happens during Q4, then your version of a Christmas bonus has evaporated (along with that employee's morale).

I do think OKRs are a handy tool. But I also think it depends on the kind of company (or more importantly, the kind of leadership) you work for. If your company has clear goals, and your CEO and board have a good vision for what the company is, and where it wants to be, then it definitely will help steer everybody forward together.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is the size of your current company? Has the OKR setup been difficult. That is, did everybody wrote their OKRs?

I think in OKR speak, individual tasks can be in your OKR as well, it just won't be aligned with any team/company vision. If it is really important day to day tasks, then it might make sense to be in your OKR.

OKRs can be a great shortcut; in your example, it seems that the quantifiable key results set should be according to the ability/expectation of the employees (which is a guesswork) in order to be fair.

For companies adopting OKR, they would have to be aware that the other benefits (transparency, pushing employee's capability, etc) comes first over easy employee evaluation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Really? You think OKRs aren't nonsense?

Anytime you set an indirect measure of success, system-manipulators will focus on the metric instead of what that metric was supposed to measure. My experience with OKRs is that teams and individuals with OKRs will:

A) Game the system. (For example, at Zynga, one team set an OKR to "examine frameworks for such and such," since implementation wasn't part of the OKR there's no way to argue they didn't examine). Individuals will be incentivized to pick OKRs that seem hard but are actually easy.

B) Disincentivize proper behavior. Engineers are valuable because they are not robots. They are thinking, evaluating, reacting people. The best engineers aren't those who meet your expectations, they're the ones who upset your expectations by inventing a side project like gmail that becomes a portion of your entire company. Valuable engineering can take many forms (assisting others, preventing security holes, cheering up cynical colleagues, standing up against bad decisions), and almost none of them can be directly measured.

<comment><USER4> The article mentions (and I agree) that OKRs aren't meant to be used for employee evaluation but rather provide a user focus on what they need to work on.

It's easy to lose sight of what your goals are when you're knee deep in a problem, so OKRs are helpful to remind you what you originally set out to accomplish.</comment></comment>


Adobe makes CS5 preorder form Flash only. Alt title: Worst use of Flash ever. - <AUTHOR> https://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/store/index.cfm?store=OLS-US&storeRegion=CA&pid=3668640&nr=0#categoryOid=4434037&loc=en_us&view=ols_prod&category=/Applications/DesignPremium&store=OLS-US

<comment><USER2> They've been Flashizing their entire web site for years; their online store has been Flash for a while.

And, yes, now we can all see why we hate Flash so much.

Adobe's attempt to create a proprietary web platform is destined to fail.

<comment><USER3> Ex-Macromedian here. It was the release of Flex (which generates Flash UIs by default) that started this trend. It was clear to me from the start that MM (now Adobe) had made a bad move with Flex because all the examples reimplemented basic HTML form + JS functionality in Flash, with a bonus "Loading" window at the start.

I know a lot of otherwise bright devs that were drawn to Flex by the MVC paradigms that littered the tutorials. Classic 'Architecture Astronaut' stuff as Spolsky would describe it which really didn't translate to delivery of better sites for users, especially once the JS frameworks took off.

In my view, the decision to trade off user experience and established standards for developer convenience is never the right one, but I guess it's a temptation if you're in the dev tools business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Talk about lock in. I wasn't able to back-button back to HN.

<comment><USER5> It also breaks scrolling with the scroll wheel.

It's almost as if they are trying to prove Jobs was right when he said code written non-natively sucks. (In this case, native would be HTML + Javascript).

<comment><USER6> >It's almost as if they are trying to prove Jobs was right

If the Flash compiled to crappy HTML+Javascript I'd agree with your analogy.

<comment><USER7> Flash CS5 allows you to export your flash to html5 canvas so in the not to distant future it will be a reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The best part is that even Adobe can't get their own flash working well... A "TypeError: Error #1034: Type Coercion failed: cannot convert mx.collections::ArrayCollection@2377c381 to Array" exception popped up in a modal dialog when it loaded (I'm using the debug version of flash). Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER9> I guess eating your own dog food doesn't always taste that great.

<comment><USER6> More like force-feeding your dog food to potential customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had an empty dialog box pop up on load that just had an "OK" button. No text ever loaded so I finally just clicked it.

The whole page took like 20 seconds to load and I can't use my scroll wheel. How annoying. And yeah, I can't use the back button.

<comment><USER11> When you change the first value from "Full" to "Upgrade" or vice-versa, an empty dialog box pops up, with no text and a Ok button. I have to clcik on it twice to dismiss it. IE on Win XP!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Jesus christ! Something in the order form wants to chat with me!

<comment><USER13> That was scary, I have to admit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That page crashed Firefox 3.6.3 on OSX 10.5.6! You need to have some ridiculously embarrassing development skills to build something like this.

Learn to use Flash, Adobe.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not seeing the Flash form in Chrome on Mac OS X.

<comment><USER16> Interesting, Chrome is directed to an HTML page, but Safari and Firefox show a full-page swf (which is piss slow to load, and clunky as hell).

It's not just the form though, it's the whole page. They have even replaced the browser scrollbar with a Flash-based scrollbar.

The page is basically a poster child for why people hate Flash.

<comment><USER17> I have tried Chrome, FF, IE, Opera and safari on windows, none of them give me flash page.

<comment><USER16> Mhm, do you have Flash installed?

I just tested in IE (in VMWare) and it gave me the flash page.

edit: maybe a/b testing?

<comment><USER17> Yes I have flash installed. Also, on latest Chrome builds Flash is integrated into Chrome, so even if I didn't have it should have worked on Chrome.

Its possible they are doing a/b testing, obviously some of you guys are getting flash.

<comment><USER16> I was thinking the failure for Chrome was UA-sniffing related, but it could be a/b testing as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ah darn, too bad there isn't a Silverlight version for the rest of us :p

<comment><USER19> Or just an HTML version from the start, for the entire world, regardless of what/where/who.

<comment><USER20> Nah, they're buying Flash, therefore it's better to remind them how badly it sucks when something important to them can't be done without Flash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not sure when they switched to a Flash-based store, but when CS4 was released the store was so overloaded you couldn't load the site. If you disabled Flash you could visit the HTML version just fine.

</comment><comment><USER22> It broke the back button for me.

Why is the kerning so bad?

I don't have an unusual setup (Firefox 3.0.1 on Mac OS X 10.5).

<comment><USER18> It broke mine as well (Firefox 3.6.3 on OS X 10.5).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interestingly if you view the page source you will notice there are 2830 characters of whitespace before the DTD. There are lots of weird tabs in there... It looks like the tabs are for some sort of server-side code that is being parsed/removed but the whitespace is being left in the rendered document.

That might seem like a small issue, but imagine how much traffic their site gets. ~2.8Kb of wasted bandwidth for every request...

<comment><USER24> Reminds me of old-school FrontPage sites.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, in this case the page is rendered by ColdFusion. Which i'm guessing is the root of the issue!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is that alt title commentary or is it actually in the page? I couldn't find it in the source, at least.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, it's a misleading HN title. I thought the page was from a disgruntled designer too.

Though -- why does the source of their page start with 100 empty lines? Do they think it'll stop people from scrolling down and seeing the source of the page?

<comment><USER27> Unless you suppress whitespace (not sure if it's always a default setting), ColdFusion will render blank lines where CFML has been run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Think of the poor devs.

"Hey, guess what part of the site you AS3 guys are going to be working on for a Q2 launch! Yes, technically it does involve animation!"

</comment><comment><USER29> The HTML page, for comparison:

[https://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/store/html/index.cfm?store=...](https://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/store/html/index.cfm?store=OLS- US&#categoryOid=4434037&loc=en_us&view=ols_prod&category=/Applications/DesignPremium&store=OLS- US)

</comment><comment><USER30> I clicked on the form wrong and suddenly the tab was filled with Chrome's "Aw, Snap!" error. I'm impressed at how Flash is enhancing web usability with rich graphics and multimedia experiences. (Error messages are an experience, right?)

</comment><comment><USER31> If you run top while you're there you can see Safari and WebKitPlugin (I'm on Mac OS 10.6) start churning away in the %CPU column, even while you're doing nothing but reading a page.

<comment><USER32> Firefox (on Windows 7) only uses 1% CPU while idling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It has been an Adobe Flex form for quite a while now. I have used it several times in the past and have never had a problem. Personally, I kind of like RIAs.

</comment><comment><USER34> Umm, I don't have flash and I was able to go through the purchase process fine. (I'm on the firefox Nightlies on Linux)

<comment><USER16> Does not _require_ Flash (Chrome seems to be directed to HTML), but if you have Flash you will see the entire page is a Flash swf (except some people aren't seeing it, but it seems that most are).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It is not flash-only. It degrades well to a HTML page if you don't have flash.

<comment><USER36> Except I have Click to Flash installed in Safari, and it still insists on that full screen flash monstrosity.

<comment><USER16> ClickToFlash behaves as if Flash is installed and working, it just prevents it from being displayed.

In other words, you will always see that gray 'Flash' box with ClickToFlash instead of getting any no-flash fallback content that may be setup.

Unfortunately I don't think there is an easy way to temporarily and completely disable Flash in Safari for sans-Flash testing.

<comment><USER37> > _Unfortunately I don't think there is an easy way to temporarily and > completely disable Flash in Safari for sans-Flash testing_

Prefs -> Security -> Uncheck "Enable Plugins", refresh.

<comment><USER16> Damn, it's right there isn't it? Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Friendly fire?

</comment><comment><USER19> Oh boy :D Sorry, I have no other words.

</comment><comment><USER38> Facepalm. :|

</comment><comment><USER39> A company used their own product to do something on their website. Oh no! Let's all cry about it.

<comment><USER6> More like: a company's use of its own product to do something on its website demonstrates how poorly the product is suited to that particular activity.</comment></comment>


Schwarzenegger gives California Legislature a Hidden Finger - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/28/schwarzenegger-gives-california-legislature-a-hidden-finger/

<comment><USER2> Techcrunch blogspam. Original:

[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/28/...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/28/MNBN1ABKB8.DTL)

and the letter:

[http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/10/27/ba- letter28_gr_...](http://imgs.sfgate.com/c/pictures/2009/10/27/ba- letter28_gr_SFCG1256695605.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the best part is the response from Ammiano, to whom the comment was directed: "I think it was very creative. They probably think they are even now and it's time to bury the hatchet." A little tit-for-tat and then move on seems appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER4> For the Canadians here on HN:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuddle_duddle>

</comment><comment><USER5> Anyone cares to calculate the odds of this happening by accident?

<comment><USER6> (1/26)^7 .. without getting too fancy with any sort of linguistic probabilities...

<comment><USER7> = about 8,000,000,000 to 1

But capitalization and spacing was correct too.

<comment><USER8> Capitalization would be correct in almost all cases. You always capitalize first letter and chances are, first word of each line won't be the beginning of a sentence. Ditto for spacing, 3-5 line paragraphs are fairly common.

<comment><USER9> How do you figure "almost all"? Even if the text could _only_ contain paragraphs of length 3 and 4, the spacing alone would be incorrect in half the cases (assuming that a 3-4 and 4-3 split is equally likely).

(Of course, we are leaving aside the fact that the full body of the message contains an additional one-line paragraph, which could _also_ be considered part of a correctly capitalized and spaced message.)

<comment><USER5> One would have to analyze all previous relevant correspondence out of the AS's office as to measure vocabulary and other structural elements.

It would be a fun project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know what Schwarzenegger's objections to this bill were?

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks like Arnold has been spending too much time on 4chan.

<comment><USER12> Seriously, this is kind of sad. He says nothing about the merits (or lack thereof) of the bill [1]. Governing isn't all about high-PR issues, and appropriate districting is an important part of making working cities.

1\. <http://www.totalcapitol.com/?bill_id=9670>

<comment><USER13> He says that the legislature has more important things to be doing right now. You may not agree, but time is limited and governing is also about making the best use of time. He appears to believe the legislature is using it poorly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 59 points? Color me surprised…

<comment><USER14> I was surely expecting downvotes because my comment didn't bring much to the table, but I'm still really surprised that this piece is still getting upvotes:

It has no link to anything startup or tech-related and is not intellectually interesting. It's just a "joke" (granted surprising) from a politician/actor.

From HN's guidelines:

"What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic."

So, yeah, I'm surprised that it's still on the front page and that I get downvoted for implying it doesn't have its place here. I understand that it's up to the community, but again, that's why I'm surprised: I didn't expect that from this community.

<comment><USER15> I don't think I'm a "good hacker", but my first instinct was to try and find an algorithm that would generate these kinds of messages.

Language processing is always interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm getting a 403 error on the page.

edit: Honestly, can someone the downvote? Clearly, I'm not the only one, as going to Hurl gives the same result: [http://hurl.it/hurls/8160ac469b2d5a0b801c8288794badeff8f14b4...](http://hurl.it/hurls/8160ac469b2d5a0b801c8288794badeff8f14b4a/180007515c480f1096b5542f13cab059d2d4c987).

<comment><USER3> Perhaps because it's not adding much to the conversation? I don't particularly care that you're receiving a 403. Plus there are several other links to the information. Perhaps, "I'm getting a 403, but here's another link to the document." Lastly, while you may not be the only one, perhaps you're one of very few, and people are simply registering their disagreement via vote rather than comment.</comment></comment>


Zig Programming Language - <AUTHOR> https://ziglang.org/ <comment><USER2> I see Zig posted here on HN all the times and I always look at it, but still it has nothing that makes me go "wow" it really is something I need to pick up. Perhaps someone with more expertise could give me reasons why I should pick it up.

I have always been interested in new languages, so I'll keep my eyes out for Zig in the future.</comment>


Samsung Galaxy Tab preview - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/02/samsung-galaxy-tab-preview/

<comment><USER2> Vanilla, official Android please - this is what's important to me. I don't want to worry about my hardware vendor deciding that they don't want to update the OS any more, and I don't want to worry about using an unofficial unaudited built of Android.

Does anyone know if this device can run vanilla android?

<comment><USER3> The Galaxy S has a one-click root exploit and then you can run what you like.

(Have to say, though, the Samsung Android version is surprisingly good).

<comment><USER2> The elephant in the room is security updates. Nobody releases them for Android at _anything like the speed_ of any other operating system.

Which is why I want an official Android running on everything: no lock in, no planned obsolescence, no worries about what the code is really doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems too small to me. Even being very negative about Apple, once I played with an iPad I was quite hooked. It is of perfect size for reading, browsing and what interests me most, social gathering around it, be it gaming or reading with 2-3 people.

Pretty much the only reason I would imagine myself getting a tablet, would be for "enhanced boardgames" and then the size must be as big as possible.

<comment><USER5> This is definitely an issue, though it seems Samsung are pushing for something that is more easily holdable in one-hand - compare to a paperback book or a Kindle.

I haven't used one yet, but I can see this being a lot easier to hold with one hand and type with another, when in a crowded tube or train, for example.

<comment><USER6> I think the iPad's form factor makes it a nice sofa device. To be truly portable it should've been slightly smaller. There's no way—I think—to hold an iPad with your hands and use both of them for interacting. One needs to support it with one's legs to fully use both hands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If the price is right I'm interested. There's only one thing that concerns me. Can anybody explain why companies insist on making super glossy screens? Is there any good reason why they can't make tablets with nice matte screens so that I can see what's on the screen rather than my own reflection.

<comment><USER8> It's hard to clean off the oil from your fingers.

<comment><USER9> On matte? I have a matte screen and can touch it here and there's no fingerprint linger. On my glossy-screen Macbook at home the screen looks like an oily mess (and all I do is sneeze occasionaly!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't get this form factor at all. And all the other Android tablets seem to be the same. Why?

I can only guess: design by committee?

<comment><USER11> Are you talking about the screen ratio being standard 16:9/10 widescreen rather than following the Apple iPad 4:3 setup like on old non-widescreen TVs?

I'm guessing most of them are just re-using existing netbook screens, just as the original netbooks re-used portable DVD screens.

Being close to the same ratio as most videos and android phones probably makes it a sensible choice. On the other hand you'd hope Apple had more than just aesthetics in mind when it chose the iPad screen ratio.

<comment><USER10> No, the 7'' displays. I don't have an iPad, but even the iPad seems quite small. I don't see the point in an even smaller tablet.

<comment><USER11> There's plenty of 10" Android tablets being displayed at IFA currently e.g. Archos 101, Toshiba Folio 100, Viewsonic ViewPad 10 etc. (Dell is supposed to do a Streak in 7 and 10 inch sizes too)

I've not seen any substantially bigger than the iPad (which is just under 10") yet, but it wouldn't surprise me.

<comment><USER10> That's good to hear. I just don't understand why they all launched 7'' tablets first. Maybe they wanted to fail, in subconscious conspiracy with Apple.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Air pollution linked to "huge" reduction in intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/air-pollution-linked-huge-reduction-intelligence <comment><USER2> The actual study [1] isn't as much clickbait:

> We find that long-term exposure to air pollution impedes cognitive > performance in verbal and math tests.

> We provide evidence that the effect of air pollution on verbal tests becomes > more pronounced as people age, especially for men and the less educated.

> The damage on the aging brain by air pollution likely imposes substantial > health and economic costs, considering that cognitive functioning is > critical for the elderly for both running daily errands and making high- > stake decisions.

[1] [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/21/1809474115](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/21/1809474115)

</comment><comment><USER3> In case anyone else wanted to quantify "huge":

> "Polluted air can cause everyone to reduce their level of education by one > year, which is huge," Yale School of Public Health's Professor Xi Chen, one > of the report's authors, said in an interview published in The Guardian.[0]

[0] [https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/air- pol...](https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/air-pollution- linked-huge-reduction-intelligence)

<comment><USER4> I'm glad Chen attempted to give an intelligible quantity, but I'm not really sure what to make of the metric. "Years of education" don't seem like an intuitive metric for cognitive impairment. Checking the abstract gets us:

> _Cutting annual mean concentration of particulate matter smaller than 10 μm > (PM10) in China to the Environmental Protection Agency's standard (50 μg > /m3) would move people from the median to the 63rd percentile (verbal test > scores) and the 58th percentile (math test scores), respectively._

For reference, another study in China found that top-decile levels of lead poisoning (>10 micrograms per deciliter) cost children about two points of IQ on both math and verbal scales. That's not trivially convertible to percentile performance, and I don't know whether air pollution has long-tail effects anything like the horrible long-tail on lead poisoning.

But it does suggest that particulate pollution has effects on the same general scale as childhood lead poisoning, which is pretty striking.

Underlying study is here: [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/21/1809474115](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/21/1809474115)

Lead study is here: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667072/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667072/)

<comment><USER5> I'd say that a "year of education" is a lot more quantifiable to your average person than "2 points of IQ".

IQ isn't used for anything meaningful in terms of ability or qualifications, especially since it's age-adjusted and historically has been biased against minorities/foreigners. A year of development however, is a graspable (if shocking) measure of lost opportunity/capability.

<comment><USER6> I disagree. "A year of education" is mostly about gaining knowledge. It's obvious that air pullution can't possibly make you forget one year of such knowledge, and I have no idea in what other intuitive way this can be interpreted that makes any sense to the average person. If it's meaningfull to someone then it's only because he understood it wrongly.

<comment><USER7> > It's obvious that air pullution can't possibly make you forget one year of > such knowledge,

Is it? What people remember of one year of education is probably very little to begin with and it only gets less over time; it doesn't seem unbelievable that pollution could cause those memories to decay faster.

<comment><USER6> Well if that seems plausible to you then it's only further proof of how misleading the wording is, as the actual study makes no claims about people forgetting a year of education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Electrification of surface transport is the most obvious way to improve air quality in dense cities. This needs to be a priority.

<comment><USER9> If by "electrification" you mean "switch to public transportation," I agree with you. If by electrification you mean "burn dinosaurs four miles away," then I don't agree with you.

<comment><USER10> Burning dinosaurs 40 miles away will improve air quality in cities, even if it's the same amount of pollution, the bulk is away from dense population

<comment><USER11> It's also much, much easier to filter the output from one plant instead of 40,000 cars. Even if the same amount of pollution were produced (it wouldn't be), nowhere near the same amount would be released into the air.

But we definitely need to improve power plant emission standards as we move to electric.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The actual study is linked early in the article here: ([http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/21/1809474115](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/21/1809474115))

Quoting:

> ... Cutting annual mean concentration of particulate matter smaller than 10 > μm (PM10) in China to the Environmental Protection Agency's standard (50 > μg/m3) would move people from the median to the 63rd percentile (verbal test > scores) and the 58th percentile (math test scores), respectively. The damage > on the aging brain by air pollution likely imposes substantial health and > economic costs, considering that cognitive functioning is critical for the > elderly for both running daily errands and making high-stake decisions.

</comment><comment><USER13> Meanwhile, the EPA is kicking academic scientists off advisory panels in this area, and replacing the panels with a small group consisting entirely of industry scientists and government officials from conservative state and local governments.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy- environment/2018/10/14...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy- environment/2018/10/14/epa-scraps-pair-air-pollution-science- panels/?utm_term=.143dd8b161c8)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd be interested in how reading more about how they're controlling for non- air pollution factors, particularly since they say the effects are most pronounced among the non educated.

<comment><USER14> For example: assume in China that people in cities generally have more opportunities to get educated.

That'd mean if you live in a city and have not had much education, it might be because you are less intelligent (on average). While if you're in a rural area, a lack of education might not mean anything, because you have less opportunity to get educated in general, regardless of intelligence.

If you did a simple regression in this case with years of education and air pollution (more common in cities) in the model, I think you'd find that -- controlling for education -- air pollution would be correlated with a reduction of intelligence, even if the air pollution itself wasn't causal.

There are ways of controlling for this, and I'm not at all saying the study didn't take this into account, but it'd be useful to know more. There are a lot of ways (as in any model) the relationship could be correlated without being causal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think it is misleading to display a picture of chimneys of nuclear power plants, when the only thing they release is clean water droplets: no SO2, NO2 or PM10.

edit: Actually, not 100% sure it's a nuclear power plant. Thanks for your comments

<comment><USER16> Do you know for sure that it's a nuclear plant in the picture? I'm asking because those iconic cooling towers are also used for coal plants.

> The hyperboloid cooling towers are often associated with nuclear power > plants,[1] although they are also used in some coal-fired plants and to some > extent in some large chemical and other industrial plants.

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower)

Direct link to the picture from the article [https://www.unenvironment.org/sites/default/files/styles/art...](https://www.unenvironment.org/sites/default/files/styles/article_billboard_image/public/2018-10/2010-10-Air%20pollution- CHINA-USA-CLIMATE.jpg)

Example cooling towers from a coal-fired power plant [https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-eon-scholven-power- station...](https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-eon-scholven-power-station-coal- fired-power-plant-cooling-towers-gelsenkirchen-89211541.html)

<comment><USER17> Even if it's not a nuclear power plant it's still a cooling tower releasing only water vapor.

<comment><USER18> Some new designs release both water vapor and other gases in the same tower, but yeah, those look like cooling towers releasing just vapor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't think this has been mentioned on this thread yet: If you live in a place where air pollution is a concern, one solution to this issue is to buy a HEPA air filter. These filters are designed to trap a significant quantity of precisely the types of particles that air quality studies examine (2.5-10µm coarse dust particles and <2.5µm fine particles).

> "To qualify as HEPA by industry standards, an air filter must remove (from > the air that passes through) 99.97% of particles that have a size greater- > than-or-equal-to 0.3 µm." [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEPA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEPA)

<comment><USER20> That's only helpful while you're at home.

Also, the obsession with HEPA and its 99.7% reduction of the relevant particles seems silly to me. For a filter that recirculates air, the relevant figure of merit is the rate at which dirty air is replaced with clean air, which is roughly the air flow through the filter times the efficiency. So a 90% efficient filter with 50% more airflow is better. For a stand-alone unit, the "clean air delivery rate" is a more sophisticated measurement.

You can do _very_ well by upgrading your HVAC filter to MERV 13 or better and running the fan for a few hours a day. But check with an HVAC contractor before you change filter types — it may affect the overall performance of the system.

For an outside air intake, the efficiency does matter, and HEPA is a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think that correlation works in both directions!

</comment><comment><USER22> I know a certain framework creator that will be all over this - and has been vocal on twitter about it.

I went looking, this seems like a pretty good air quality monitor: [https://www.amazon.com/AirVisual-Quality-Monitor-Accuracy- Pa...](https://www.amazon.com/AirVisual-Quality-Monitor-Accuracy- Particle/dp/B01MF6X1YK) (~$400)

There are cheaper ones too; but do your research, as accuracy (and ideas about what constitutes accurate) can vary from manuf. to manuf.

[https://medium.com/@dhh/air-quality-matters-but-dont- trust-f...](https://medium.com/@dhh/air-quality-matters-but-dont-trust-foobot- on-it-e2df4234a776)

also apparently, a box fan + filter ain't so bad. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU)

</comment><comment><USER23> I recently learned that the parisian subway and suburban trains contain a lot of particulate pollution (e.g. PM10), caused by braking (electrical brakes would reduce this) and rail grinding (maintenance done to reduce squealing in curves). The small particulate pollution is actually worse than what you find in traffic jams in the city center...

I'm looking into buying an anti-pollution mask. It will probably look weird, since nobody wears masks there... People will probably think I'm sick or something. Maybe I should buy some techwear clothing to complete the "goth- ninja" look, but I'm not sure how that will fly at work.

I have an air purifier at home since 3 years (Philips AC4072/11). I think it's a good investment, since I spend around 50% of the time at home. It also seems to have helped with my allergies, but that might be placebo.

<comment><USER24> For what it's worth, I wear a respirator[1] when I take the subway. Some people may look at you, but I don't really care.

That being said, I recall reading an article where they said studied long term subway commuters and did not find health issues due to commuting.

Furthermore, you can apparently build an air filter for the fraction of the cost: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q45CkwKiOvw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q45CkwKiOvw)

[1] like the "3M Aura Particulate Respirator". There are also filter with activated charcoal

<comment><USER25> Do you live in NYC? and have you found that it helps?

<comment><USER24> I commute to NYC. Yes it reduces the subway smell substantially.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Previous discussion of the same topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17867085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17867085)

</comment><comment><USER26> If you're curious about your own exposure to air pollutants, I'd recommend Plume Labs. They also have a handheld device that I preordered and hope to take around my town to see where the hotspots are. [https://air.plumelabs.com/en/](https://air.plumelabs.com/en/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Is there a way to counteract the effects? Especially if you live in a large city?

<comment><USER28> I'm going to hazard a guess and say exercise - yes, even outside in the pollution (though you should probably favour a park over a main road).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What's with the use of the word "linked"? Is thay synonymous with "correlated"?

I feel like it's just another way to suggest causation without knowing that it is causation.

<comment><USER30> It's more of a weasel word than correlated is, even. It suggests that there's a meaningful connection but it could just be coincidence, even moreso than correlation.

<comment><USER31> correlated is well defined.

but can be used by weasels, so yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> china number 1

</comment><comment><USER33> Beijing central district anybody?

</comment><comment><USER34> industrial places have less of a demand on higher education

</comment><comment><USER35> Well that explains Los Angeles.

</comment><comment><USER34> industrial places have less of a demand for education

</comment><comment><USER36> do something about education and media - that has an actual HUGE impact...

</comment><comment><USER37> I've always beleived that measuring intelligence is extremely ignorant. I find it funny that we try to take the insanely complex, multi-dimensional organ of the brain and try to map it to a one dimensional score (e.g. IQ, verbal, math tests).

</comment><comment><USER38> With China and India leading the race in terms of producing intelligent people (in terms of quantity), it is rather hard to believe. Nonetheless, air pollution is a serious topic and needs to be dealt with ASAP.

<comment><USER39> What? Are you talking about percentages?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Reminder: part of Google's new Project Dragonfly is a feature that allows Beijing to lie about air pollution figures in real-time.

[https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china- prototype-l...](https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype- links-searches-to-phone-numbers/)</comment>


How Do You Document Data? - <AUTHOR> What methods do you use for documenting database schema and columns and communicating that documentation to non-technical stakeholders who may be performing analysis? <comment><USER2> A traditional DB model diagram that shows the schema, columns and keys and relationships (primary and foreign keys) should do it I think</comment>


Show HN: Best YouTube gifmaker - <AUTHOR> https://gifrun.com/youtube <comment><USER2> Having used both this and gifs.com (formally gifyoutube.com) I can say that I prefer the latter. It's as simple as replacing youtube.com with gifs.com in the URL[1].

Disclaimer: I work at gifs.com

1\. [https://www.gifs.com/watch?v=jhyANGHDDH8](https://www.gifs.com/watch?v=jhyANGHDDH8)</comment>


Machine read 3.5M books and told us what it thought about men and women - <AUTHOR> https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/men-women-books <comment><USER2> MALE, Negatives: Unarmed and wounded...</comment>


Ask HN: Would like a 2nd set of eyes to look over some http traffic captures - <AUTHOR>

http traffic capture: http://pastebin.com/bzKeMtJi
I had 1 open chrome window set to the new tab page, but network activity was blinking pretty steady. Paranoia leads to inspection and I found this strange connection posting back and forth from facebook. It appears it opened while I was reading a story on money.cnn.com but it never closed. Note that the capture start time is after i closed all browser windows and cleared all browsing data in chrome (habit of mine to do that before i close chrome completely).
I wasnt aware this was possible, to keep the connection going completely outside the context of any webpage, and beyond that theres some strange data thats a bit new to me. Specifically the X-Cnction: field that they put in, and some of the options placed in the Cache: field (must-revalidate?).
This is mostly a curiousity as im trying to decipher purpose, and also generally if my concept of JavaScript security is way off (I was under the impression closing a website where the JavaScript was loaded would terminate it?). My best guess so far is that theyre trying to compile data on what people read, whatever they can wring the browser into telling them via JS, but i may be way off so if youre familiar with HTTP traffic and ajax/xmlhttp id appreciate your thoughts. I put it up on pastebin - http://pastebin.com/bzKeMtJi <comment><AUTHOR> Was going to delete this item but maybe someone will find this useful. I assumed JS was active since the query string contained the variable "post_form_id_source=AsyncRequest" which to me seemed like an obvious nod the now ubiquitous xmlHTTPRequest being used. While it doesn't prove conclusively that there wasn't JS running, it does make it plausible that it was purely an HTTP connection kept alive by X-Cnoection header. Im still fuzzy as to how this works or how its done but ill post a quick excerpt of what i found after some searching:

"Missed Cneonctions

This header:

Cneonction: close and its variant:

nnCoection: close were two of the headers which first spurred my interest in HTTP headers.

imdb.com, amazon.com, gamespy.com, and google.com have all at various times used these or similar misspellings of connection, and I'm not by any means the first to have noticed. My first thought was that this was just a typo. After more consideration, however, I now believe this is something done by a hackish hardware load balancer trying to "remove" the connection close header when proxying for an internal server. That way, the connection can be held open and images can be transmitted through the same TCP connection, while the backend web server doesn't need to be modified at all. It just closes the connection and moves on to the next request. Ex-coworker and Mudd alumus jra has a similar analysis."

source: [http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with- http-h...](http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-headers)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can see it in the logs but ill point it out specifically, origination point seems to be money.cnn.com which I was reading at one point. I do not visit facebook directly or have a facebook account if its relevant.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the not-so obvious things to consider while API integration? - <AUTHOR> We are in the process of selecting an external vendor to integrate with. So, right now we are reading documentations of potential vendors and in the process of doing a doing a feasibility study. Assuming all vendors provide similar capabilities in terms of costs, features, support, API response times, load testing results and the like what are some pratical things to consider before moving forward ahead with one? <comment><USER3> Two big questions:

* How do they handle deprecation?

At some point, they're going to realize that their API design is wrong, could be better, or could take advantage of new patterns, methods, or even customer usage patterns. As a result, they're going to have to restructure and potentially deprecate things. Do they handle it with transparency, honesty or even just make sure your stuff still works?

At Twilio, the 2008 endpoints have been deprecated for 5+ years but _still work_ and - to the best of my knowledge - there's no sunset announced. Yes, all the examples, docs, sdks, etc encourage you to use the new endpoints but the old ones are there. Compare that to Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc which turn on and off APIs and break things with little regard for end users. Which leads to the second question..

* What's their business model?

If they make more money as you use the platform more, that's great! In biz speak, your interests are aligned! They're going to make sure you get started as quickly as possible, minimize downtime, and make sure that your stuff works now and forever. Once again, that's the Twilio model.

If you scale from 1 to 10 to 1M requests/day and they make the same amount of money (or none in many cases), then they're going to be less concerned if you can't make 1, 5, or even 10% of those calls. Even worse, if the API itself is primarily used for market penetration purposes (once again: Twitter), they may treat you as a free R&D group and let you do the exploration and prove the market before they step in.

* Early Twilio employee, current Okta employee, wrote a book on API Design

<comment><USER4> I totally agree on the second point (business model alignment), however I believe that amount of requests does in a lot of cases not mean that your interests are aligned.

Examples:

* A REST API needs 3 calls for $foobar. A GraphQL API only needs 1 call. The vendor will loose money if they optimize their API in a way that you can make less calls.

* Some of your data does not frequently change. If you pay per request, you can save money by caching. However, that'll make your implementation more complex (esp. if the API is supposed to be used directly from mobile apps).

IMO it's better if the API provider can charge based on business metrics. E.g. Stripe charges based on payment volumne. It doesn't matter if you do 2 or 200 API calls to make a payment.

<comment><USER3> I started by saying "use the platform more" and went to API requests because that's the natural connection but you're right that the more proper phrasing should probably be "more successful with the platform"

<comment><USER5> Also relevant to this platform -- if your business is more successful when your customers are more successful, and they tell you that, and together you can measure that... you might be in a good place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have worked with a few vendors to integrate with their API. Some things that need to be considered:

1\. Do they provide an easy way to create a sandbox/staging/test/dev environment ? Good example: Stripe. Really bad example: Paypal. Why ? Well, for starters, you need to create a completely separate account just to get a sandbox env in paypal. Then there is no guarantee that sandbox is identical to production in terms of ability to build and test.

2\. What are their Rate Limits ? Some APIs are well designed but have terrible rate limits.

3\. Authentication mechanism and security. How do they authenticate the API access ? This can matter for building critical apps.

4\. Do they use REST or not ?

5\. Do they have good documentation ? Can you do a quick test using their documentation or is it required to call their support ?

6\. Do they have good support ?

7\. Do they version their API changes and are those changes backward compatible ?

I am sure there are more but these are some good ones to start with.

<comment><USER7> > Do they use REST or not

Meh. REST semantics really only works well when you're doing CRUD operations. They get clunky when something's modeled around actions rather than entities. That said, make sure their response codes and methods make sense.

<comment><USER8> I agree in the sense rest is not as imortant as say: is the api XML or JSON? I've integrated many B2B APIs which tend to be varying degrees of XML, plain and sane to rabbithole insane or worst of all SOAP which apparently is really still a thing people use and take seriously in B2B api context.

Sigh, xml hard at work solving a problem we never seen, but creates such a bloted horrible mess where json would have been simple and better.

<comment><USER7> I see both sides. The magic of SOAP is you can give a tool a WSDL and it will generate bindings in a language of your choice.

The downside is it has to be pretty complicated to enable the magic, so building it can be complicated, and debugging it is a nightmare. You could say the same about a lot of modern JS, and that's been somewhat solved by amazing tooling.

<comment><USER9> Swagger/OpenAPI does that for rest to some extent

<comment><USER8> Just want to add one thing about swagger:

please think through your API if you are to design an API, the tools will not think for you and you can fool yourself instead...

Swagger will not magically solve anything. I have seen and experienced that you can really create nonsensical but pretty and auto documented APIs using swagger in no time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This may sound a little random, but one of the things that varies most between APIs is date and time formats. Many API implementations come up with their own. Looking at what the date format is tells you how much thought has gone into looking the API design. Hopefully it one of the ISO 8601 options, otherwise I'd start looking more carefully at the documentation

<comment><USER7> Related to that is how they handle currencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Look for what users have said about them, and their own published uptime/event history. Some big-name services are surprisingly unreliable.

Agree with codegeek about sandboxes. With some vendors it's hard to test your code because their sandbox doesn't look like their live service, or hard to come up with instructions in those cases where you need to ask your customers to interact with a vendor. Some vendors make our tests that integrate against them flaky because the sandbox is flaky :/

Look carefully for things that smell either like too little attention to detail or great attention to detail. For example, for a while a big payment gateway had, basically, a webhook for telling you about payments/payment failures on recurring transactions, but there was no retry mechanism, so if a connection was lost for any reason, so was your data. At the other extreme, it's a good sign if they go above and beyond in some areas, e.g. Twilio and Stripe have great documentation, their approaches to deprecation/compatibility are good, and Stripe offering the idempotency-key mechanism showed they'd spent time solving the whole not-charging-people-twice-because-of-an- inconveniently-timed-network-glitch thing.

This is probably a quirky personal preference, but I'm encouraged when vendors offer APIs for single-item and bulk operations and the bulk ops perform OK with a lot of items. We have some generally alright vendors whose APIs turn out to be painfully slow when we sync data for our largest customers back to our servers. This is a problem that would not necessarily have shown up from testing a high request rate; it's a matter of scaling well with amount of data _stored_.

Some services have "old" and "new" APIs that are not fully integrated, e.g. auth credentials needed and object IDs might differ between them. Sometimes you have to use both to get all of the functionality you want. This hasn't tended to correlate with a good developer experience. On the other hand needing to make your new API distinct is probably inevitable sometimes due to business history or other practicalities--I wouldn't make a decision just based on that.

Comprehensible pricing is a good sign, though of course that's more achievable some times than others. Something like AWS or GCP has accumulated a lot of cost/pricing details to sort through since there are a lot of types of resources they offer, and there aren't really shortcuts to get around that.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does the API return a 200 status code and empty response body for all calls to a given endpoint(even failed ones)? Hi Salesforce, great dreamforce event you threw last week!

<comment><USER13> Last year worked with a variant of this. Status 200 always with in the message body the actual status code and message. Whyyy.

<comment><USER14> Successful response? 200 and a JSON payload.

Error response? 200 and a human-readable string describing the error.

<comment><USER13> Yes, the idea is indeed a signal that the request was received and the message the actual response. Problem is, if you are going to send me the actual HTTP status code in the 200 response with no additional information, you might as well send directly. Works better with all the libraries as well. Now we had to write a layer of abstraction to pull the actual message and code an forward that into our applications and third party libs. Personally, I prefer APIs that adhere to the HTTP status codes as defined in the standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some really great points here, so won't rehash those. Some additional things to consider:

\- Request size limitations (implicit and explicit, such as only allowing GET and being limited by what can be URL encoded)

\- Response size limits, especially for reporting or data retrieval APIs.

\- Concurrency limits in addition to rate limiting (e.g. Requests per second limit AND number of queued requests limit)

\- SLA have been talked about, but you always need to quadrupole check this and your contract outs based on number of incidents, etc.

\- Consider upstream/downstream dependencies, for example Twilio itself is not likely to go down, but one of the regional telcos/carriers/rate centers are. What options do you have then? (Twilio allows SIP trunks from other carriers to be connected for example.)

</comment><comment><USER16> > Assuming all vendors provide similar capabilities in terms of costs, > features, support, API response times, load testing results and the like

This is a terrible assumption. This is one of the things that differentiates vendors. No two vendors are the same, especially things like staging environments, capacity limits, etc.

But other things are:

1) Do they have a real-time status page?

2) How many outages have they had in the last year, and how severe were they?

3) Where is their support based? And is it 24x7? What if you have an issue at 2am on Saturday morning, do they have support?

4) How attentive are they to fixing bugs?

</comment><comment><USER17> Experience with customers similar to you, e.g. your competitors. There are many factors about your field, or size, etc. that the vendor may be already familiar with.

</comment><comment><USER7> Don't forget to make your response parsing compatible with future versions. If the response is JSON, make sure that an added field or switching between a field being null/{}/absent doesn't change your behavior. These subtle things change often enough when vendors refactor their code, and you want your implementation to be robust.

</comment><comment><USER18> I did similar research for a project. one vendor looked better than all others. had a good documentation, extensive, versioned API... or so I thought. Documentation was old and incomplete, API breaks regularly without notice. So my advive: try to get infos from someone who already uses that vendor. I was very shocked and disappointed after 1 month.

</comment><comment><USER7> Look at if they have an SDK for the language you'll be using. How much of it is open-source? How hard would it be to extend it? How hard is it to roll your own? Were they careful in their resource cleanup? How many new dependencies does the SDK bring into your project, and how well-understood are they?

</comment><comment><USER19> How they support backward compatibility

<comment><USER20> This is one of the biggest ones for me. Also known as "are you going to make me rewrite my damn application every time you think you had a good idea".

I just looked back at some old web projects from about 6-7 years ago that I'd mostly forgotten about, to see if anything was worth keeping. Every last one that called out to an API is now non-functional. Oh well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> 1.) Can you test against it easily? E.g. how good are mocks and test version of API?

2.) Documentation quality. Can you read it and understand? Does it contain details and examples or rather fuzzy generalities?

3.) Do the company seem stable? How likely are they to disappear (or get into trouble) three years later?

</comment><comment><USER22> Nothing else matters if the vendor stops operating or refuses to continue services/pricing that you'd been relying on.

If this API is mission-critical, write drop-in replacement drivers for other vendors and/or get a commitment from them in writing.

</comment><comment><USER23> If the vendor you pick goes "tits up" with minimal notice, what is your Plan B, or Plan C?

How essential will any given vendor be to your biz model? If they are acquired, say by a competitor, where will that leave you?

How might any of these "relationships" effect your exit strategy? That is, what you find palatable and necessary your suitor might not.

</comment><comment><USER24> See if they connect to Zapier? Good indicator of a dedication to connections imo.

</comment><comment><USER4> In addition to what has been mentioned already (esp. backwards-compatibility):

* Ability to customize / extend

I'm assuming your API is targeted at a business domain (vs. an infrastructure API like an email API). The API vendor will do his best to cover all major use cases within that business domain. But expect that your project has a minor use case, or is the first project to ever need feature X. The vendor most likely won't want to implement this feature. (This isn't necessarily bad - <USER2> fact it is good, if the vendor would add any random feature to his API, it would evolve into a frankenstein that is a nightmare to work with)

However, the vendor should have features and patterns/best-practices on how to solve those cases. E.g. in addition to the API vendors data model, you should be able to add your own data (like [https://stripe.com/docs/api#metadata](https://stripe.com/docs/api#metadata)) and you should be able to react to events to add custom behaviour (e.g. [https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks](https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks)).

* Quality of documentation and support

A lacking documentation, especially in combination with bad support, can slow down development significantly. Some APIs also have a good community outside of the vendor (e.g. it's active on Stackoverflow), take that into consideration as well.

Also, are the POs and Devs active in support? If yes, this is a good sign IMO, because they're trying to stay in touch with their customers. And it'll also raise the quality level of the support, because - if you run into trouble - you can escalate to someone who really knows what is going on.

* Good SDKs in your language

Some API vendors offer great SDKs. They can be a huge timesaver, e.g. if they provide models for all their endpoints, they provide additional helper methods ontop of the API, and they convert data-types into language-native objects (e.g. Money isn't a native data-type of JSON, but of most languages). It is also valuable if the SDKs (and docs) come with lots examples in your language.

Some SDKs are okay-ish, especially if generated from Swagger/Raml. Some generated ones are a bit strange and it may be better to work directly with the API if it let's you craft your models in the way you need them to.

Some SDKs are a nightmare. We had one that leaked threads and killed our servers after a couple hours... not fun!

* Development workflow

As a dev, how can you use the API for testing? On staging? Does this incur additional costs?

You may need to reproduce a bug from your production API. It's helpful if you can copy the production data into your dev project easily.

(I'm an API dev @ commercetools)

</comment><comment><USER25> Is that correct English these days? I'm reading the headline thinking "while API integration...what?"</comment>


If the Tuition Doesn't Get You, the Cost of Student Housing Will - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-13/if-the-tuition-doesn-t-get-you-the-cost-of-student-housing-will <comment><USER2> The higher education cost rose way faster than inflation, with nearly no return, and no accountability. [1-4]

The Federal guaranteed student loans are a nightmare. Academia knows that she will get paid, no matter what. They raise the prices and do not qualify students properly. When the student drops out in year three, the student ends up with with $50K student loans at 10% interest, that they will take years to pay off, but no college degree to help. If graduated, the degree loses it's value in less than 4 years.

Anyone ever asked you what you got your degree in, or classes, or cared about your magna cum laude after 4 years of work? They why have to pay for it for the next 15 years?

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would say academia created the hysteria about healthcare costs to divert the attention from them forcibly violating the young and immature.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-08-26/college-c...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-08-26/college- costs-surge-500-in-u-s-since-1985-chart-of-the-day) [2] [https://www.businessinsider.com/this-chart-shows-how- quickly...](https://www.businessinsider.com/this-chart-shows-how-quickly- college-tuition-has-skyrocketed-since-1980-2015-7) [3] [https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures- tabl...](https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures- tables/average-rates-growth-published-charges-decade)</comment>


TED Q&A: Neurologist Oliver Sacks  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/ted-qa-neurol-1.html <comment><USER2> For anybody who hasn't read "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat", I highly recommend it. Very interesting read (especially for ex-neurology students like myself).</comment>


Is 7nm the Last Major Node? - <AUTHOR> https://semiengineering.com/7nm-last-major-node/ <comment><USER2> I wondered how 7nm compares to the size of single silicon atoms. Google says the van der Waals radius of a silicon atom is 210pm. This translates to around 30 atoms for 7nm, considering about 20% spacing between atoms. However I am not a chemist, so perhaps I am wildly off. Anyone here can give some elucidation?

<comment><USER3> If I am not mistaken, a 14nm feature is about 20 or so Si atoms wide, so a 7nm feature would be about 10 or so Si atoms wide. If this is correct, clearly the next process node after 7nm (3.5nm, presuming halving each time) would be the last process node that allows an integer breadth (5 Si atoms). Beyond that you'd be down to non-integer feature breadths (or alternatively, non-integer average breadths with wide variances).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In terms of TSMC Roadmap, We have

10nm > 2017 7nm > 2018 7nm+ > 2019 7nm EUV / 5nm > 2020

Is the same thing they said 16nm was the last major node, but TSMC, after 4 - 5 iteration of 16nm, with one of them now called 12nm, has gotten cheaper. And it seems they have plans to further reduce the cost of 16/12nm.

I expect the same for 7nm. Both 12nm and 7nm will be much more affordable in 2020. Right now the uncertainty is 5nm and 3nm. Both are technically achievable, the problem is cost. At the moment 5nm+ cost structure looks like exclusive to certain industry and clients. Unless they bring in 450mm wafer but i have no idea how that is working out.

And 28nm remains the cheap and cherrful solution with no replacement in sight.

<comment><USER5> Is 28nm still the cheapest when lifetime power consumption is factored into the cost?

<comment><USER4> Cheapest in terms of Design and Manufacture at Scale. As a matter of fact 28nm prices is going up due to supply constraint, and 22nm ULP is not out and wont be as cost effective yet, and i doubt it will be in the future, it will be a tool for TSMC to keep higher margin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Probably.</comment>


What's the best way to get testers for a new iOS app? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
My team and I are launching our first iOS app.  It's a math keyboard that can be used to typeset pretty much any type of equation, which can then be shared through most native apps as an image.  Would love to get some ideas on how to recruit a few testers.
I know product hunt is a nice place to start.  Any other ideas? <comment><USER2> You could give [http://www.usertesting.com/](http://www.usertesting.com/) a try. I have used it for web apps and been very happy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Step 1. Walk into a University.

Step 2. Enter the mathematics department.

Step 3. Talk to anyone you see, especially anyone in front of a blackboard writing equations, and ask them to Try your keyboard.

Forget product hunt. Forget online.

Hit the streets!

Rinse and repeat. Also try : Physics, Statistics, Biology, Chemistry ( avoid CompSci since there will be too many time wasting questions from "app experts" and people who want to "help you out". Ignore. )

You will have so much info by the end of this. Take a friend, and video or tape record what you can. At the very least, have your friend take notes. Deconstruct at the end of the day. Rinse and repeat.

<comment><USER4> I think he got a good point and if you are talking in person you can see the reaction to your product "live" and really capture the experience of your tester.</comment></comment>


SQLite: The Universal SQL Database Engine - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/linode-cube/sqlite-the-universal-sql-database-engine-a26199c366fc <comment><USER2> This article neglects to mention one of the biggest shortcomings of SQLite: lack of support for the SQL:2003 standard, especially window functions.</comment>


Only Have Two Phases in Your Career - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/statspotting/status/1094086312594980864 <comment><USER2> > "You Should Only Have Two Phases In Your Career: Finding What You Love and > Doing What You Love"

This is much too simplistic. People's interests change over time, so something that I love in my 20s may no longer interest me after I've been doing it for 20 years. So my career may have several iterations of finding and doing.

Also, not everyone may not be able to make a living doing what they love. For example, if I love acting, I may have to work as a waiter to pay the rent between acting jobs, and there's no guarantee that I'll ever get a role in a Broadway play or a Hollywood movie - there's a lot of competition for a small number of jobs.</comment>


Show HN: Delete with your Macbook Pro's power key - <AUTHOR> http://pkamb.github.io/PowerKey/

<comment><USER2> Given that holding the button still causes the Mac to shutdown... this seems awful dangerous. I could easily see myself holding the button to delete a few lines of text and then * oops *.

As trapexit mentioned, fn+Delete already does this, an can easily be entered without removing your hands from the main keyboard area.

<comment><USER3> It might've been a better idea to remap the eject button on CD drive less MacBooks. But it would still be weird, I'd just use fn + delete.

<comment><USER4> What eject button? Why would Apple put an eject button on a laptop with nothing to eject? Fucking retard.

<comment><USER5> Looks like you're new here?

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

Check out "in comments" in particular.

         When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

In your case: Apple wouldn't put an eject button on a laptop with nothing to eject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Coincidentally, I just discovered today that you can also do a forward-delete on a Mac laptop keyboard by hitting Fn+Delete. Very useful for e.g. sending a ⌘⌦ (Ctrl-Alt-Del) to a VirtualBox VM.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm typing this on a late 2011 Macbook Pro and I'm confused. Do I have a power key that is different than my power button? The power button seems too far away from the keyboard to be usefully remapped.

<comment><USER8> I was a bit confused as well, the power button on mine is at the edge and not something you'd like to press very often.

What power buttons on newer MacBooks look like: [http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/retinaMacBookPro/DSC...](http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/retinaMacBookPro/DSC_7479.jpg)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the clarification; this software look more useful in that case. It would be even nicer if it would enable me to remap my eject key, since I never use my optical drive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most confusing things for recent Mac converts:

Not having a forward delete key.

No obvious way to "alt-tab" between an apps windows, even less obvious on international keyboards.

No way to use arrow keys to select the OK and cancel buttons in a dialog.

Some Windows-isms was recently added, such as being able to resize the windows using any border. This must have been to appease converts. Do you think Apple will add any of the above soon?

<comment><USER10> Even worse - on my MBP there is no pound sign on the keyboard. Try coding without a pound sign! (EDIT: I'm referring to the hash key, i.e. #)

(I know it's alt 3, but WHY didn't they mark it on the keyboard? Newcomers have to google this! There is a sign on the '2' key that indicates euro (alt 2 is euro sign on my keyboard), so they could have done it easily on the 3 key.

<comment><USER11> The hidden pipe key is also annoying.

And the [ key, and the ] key, and the { and } keys. etc. etc.

<comment><USER10> I have those keys, how is it that they are hidden on yours? Special characters due to language?

<comment><USER11> They aren't printed on the keys: [https://www.apple.com/macbookair/images/features_keyboard_ba...](https://www.apple.com/macbookair/images/features_keyboard_backlit.png)

<comment><USER12> Huh? They're right there on the right, below the delete key.

<comment><USER11> Oops that's an American keyboard layout.

Try this: <http://www.kbcovers.com/catalog/GER-M-CB_Full_A.gif>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> An alternative is Double Command. I've been using Double Command to map the right ALT key to forward delete for awhile now: <http://doublecommand.sourceforge.net/>

Here's a screenshot of the settings: <http://i.imgur.com/GQi5Ncj.png>

</comment><comment><USER14> Worked on a mini all last year, first real mod I did was fixing forward delete: <http://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/>

Made the dock 2D, bought a wired keyboard and mouse, line in adapter for my analog headset and it was a usable workstation.

<comment><AUTHOR> What did you remap it to?

<comment><USER14> Plain ol' Delete

I remember you need to get a bit creative with the config files, I don't think it's one of the default settings.

<comment><AUTHOR> So your Mac's "delete" key now performs forward delete? How do you backspace?

<comment><USER14> I had a full size key board to replace the stock bluetooth one, so I had both.

I'm a big guy and like a full keyboard, large screen etc. After the very first time the mouse died I went out and got all wired peripherals for my workstation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> OS X has an delightful affinity for Emacs bindings in standard implementations - try Ctrl-d to delete without leaving home row.

Mind you, if you're in MS Word for Mac then you'll just have to suck on an egg: no Ctrl-d, Ctrl-a, Ctrl-e for you.

</comment><comment><USER16> My CapsLock is mapped to Control and I use 'C-d' to forward-delete in OS X.

<comment><USER17> As is mine. It's pretty nice...especially using 'C-h' for regular delete.</comment></comment>


Launching Fairphone 3 - <AUTHOR> https://www.fairphone.com/en/2019/08/27/launching-fairphone-3/ <comment><USER2> I waited a long time for this phone. I've been looking for an easy to repair, future proofed phone for quite some time. The only problem is that the screen size is 5.65" and that is just too big for me. I may end up getting it due to all of the other features, but I don't think so. My hands are just to small.

</comment><comment> throwaway-9320 Would love to get one, but it's not every time that a company actually discourages buying a new phone if your old one still works: [https://www.fairphone.com/en/2019/05/20/the-most- sustainable...](https://www.fairphone.com/en/2019/05/20/the-most-sustainable- phone-is-the-one-you-already-own/)

Really appreciate what they are doing here though, simple to repair phone with a sensible price tag.

</comment><comment><USER3> Okay, so does anyone have any tips on how I can go about buying one of these?

I'm not seeing any obvious store links or anything.....

I might not us it as a daily driver, but I'd like to support the project, if I can. And I'd like to get some experience with a version of Android that hasn't been loaded with crap ware.

<comment><USER4> [https://shop.fairphone.com/en/](https://shop.fairphone.com/en/)

<comment><USER5> Note that even well after the fairphone 2 release the link said pre-order and not buy now. I'm not sure if it was ever "for sale" as such or if they just did things in batches, or possibly just an oversight or translation error.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was looking through the how tos, I like that they make it easy to repair.

Do they give tutorials on how to compile AOSP on it, so you can make your own ROM? I couldn't find that nor how to unlock the bootloader

<comment> throwaway-9320 If Fairphone 2 is any indication on how things will go then you will have no trouble installing whatever software you want on it. Not sure about instructions on how to compile AOSP, but I don't think that it will be impossible as LineageOS has managed to support the latest version of Android on Fairphone 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's nice that someone is working for ethical hardware.

Is it possible to run more ethical software that doesn't track you? (not google-based android)

<comment><USER5> Librem 5 ([https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/](https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/)) is doing just that, a standard linux phone running standard linux apps with upstream drivers.

Most of the software effort going into librem 5 could be directly applicable to this. The barrier will be any proprietary drivers in the fairphone, but there is a lot of opportunity for their efforts to be very complimentary.

<comment><USER3> Hmm. Not Android. CPU separation from baseband. Sounds good!</comment></comment></comment>


Google Street View cars are measuring air quality in Oakland, California - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/about/stories/future-of-anti-pollution-tech/ <comment><USER2> This is great news.

The sooner this gets rolled out as a standard Google Maps feature the better. I fully expect that property prices would change quite significantly if this data was easily Googleable. Then we might see some serious efforts to tidy up air quality.

The thing with air quality is that if it is consistently bad and you live in a city then you have no idea what clean air 'tastes' like. There are lots of people living in cities who have youth on their side and have no idea what they are really breathing.</comment>


How to get a job as a designer without going to design school - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/bad8cdb67068 <comment><USER2> Previously discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907146)</comment>


Hi, I'm a... PC now? - <AUTHOR> http://backwardspyglass.tumblr.com/post/46037655374/hi-im-a-pc-now

<comment><USER2> This is a weak argument full of murky assumptions. Apple was an "edgy brand" until Jobs died, and now that they sent an email blast about the fact that an independent agency with a fair amount of credibility thinks they make the best phone, they're in trouble?

You can't be the underdog forever. Once you win, it doesn't make sense to focus only on belittling your competition. Apple's brand is, and has been, about trying to make the best stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> This award is for customer satisfaction. It doesn't make them a monolith; it makes them a creator of a thing that people are happy to own and use.

It is the very worst kind of behavior that people pejoratively describe as "hipster" to look at an advertisement proclaiming "Hey, people really like us" and respond with "That just makes me hate you more."

</comment><comment><USER4> Judging the direction Apple is heading toward from that ad looks a bit exaggerated to me. The author forgot that Apple were not in the same position at the time of the "I'm a Mac" campaign as they are today with the iPhone.

Today, they have a product every other manufacturer wants to beat, and so their strategy is reasonable, showing that they have not been beaten yet, so this kind of ads. At the time, they were trying people to adopt an ecosystem (the Mac) that was anecdotal in comparison to the PC, totally different exercise..

</comment><comment><USER5> Apple has been touting their JD Power awards since forever, certainly even back when they were also running the "I'm a Mac" ads. Feels like the author is looking for things to hang his preconceived notions on.

</comment><comment><USER6> Meh. Apple has gone from underdog to overdog, hipsters upset.

<comment><USER7> I fear its more than that. They seem content to sit on their laurels, that's what I get from reading the articles.

<comment><USER4> If you look in the past, Apple has always had this strategy. They iterate their products very slowly, with always one or two additions with each generation to keep the customer/user interested in buying the new iPhone, but not enough so he buys also the next one. That is how they play the game.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Atlantica – Create a mobile app for free in 10 minutes,no code required - <AUTHOR> https://atlantica-app.com <comment><USER2> Link is just an image. As far as I can see from the JS part, redirection is failing.

var language = window.navigator.language;

if(language == 'en-US') { window.location.href = '[https://www.atlantica- app.com/en/home'](https://www.atlantica-app.com/en/home') }

else if(language == 'pt' || language == 'pt-BR'){ window.location.href = '[https://www.atlantica-app.com/pt/home'](https://www.atlantica- app.com/pt/home') }

<comment> rafa-atlantica Fixed now! Thanks for pointing it out, rookie mistake =(</comment></comment>